Rockwell expands its India workforce to 4,000

Rockwell Automation’s India workforce has expanded to 4,000, driven by a surge in manufacturing activity and supportive government policies, including taxation and planning incentives, Asia Pacific president Scott Wooldridge said.

About a decade ago, the industrial automation and digital transformation company had around 700 employees in India. The country is now its second-largest employee base globally after the US.

“We’ve made a commitment with our manufacturing footprint in India and we’re looking for other opportunities to expand. We think more of our portfolio will be manufactured in India over time,” Wooldridge said.


The company opened a new manufacturing facility in Chennai last year reportedly at a cost of Rs 500 crore. Wooldridge said the plant will initially focus on exports rather than the domestic market.

"But one of the reasons to put infrastructure and plants in India is because of the size of the domestic market. We know that to be competitive, we need to be in the market with our own manufacturing facilities. We’re supplying some of that product domestically and we expect that volume to increase,” he said.

Growth drivers

Rockwell is bullish on India, citing strong performance from its software and hardware design centres.

“There has been growing demand from data centres and renewables and our technology is well suited for these industries,” said Dilip Sawhney, managing director, Rockwell Automation India. “When it comes to process tools used in semiconductor fabs, that investment is part of our resiliency efforts. We felt that while we already had manufacturing capacity globally, we needed to augment it from a resiliency standpoint. That was one of the reasons we set up a factory in India.”

The China factor

The company has three manufacturing bases in Asia—India, China and Singapore.

“The learnings through Covid and some of the economic or political instability over the last five to 10 years have made it clear that every company needs resiliency in their supply chain and they need multiple manufacturing locations,” he said. “We think we need more locations and it could be to manage a tariff situation or it could be as downstream suppliers move their plants. It’s good to be close to where their infrastructure is.”

It is also how Rockwell plans to differentiate itself from Chinese automation players.

“We will provide an integrated system—software, networking, controllers, drives, motion, etc—whereas most of the Chinese companies have established themselves with one or two products in that stack. So we think there’s value in having a fully integrated solution that we test and validate through a single software platform,” he said.

The challenge in such a scenario will be to bridge the skills gap.

“You need to skill people quickly, but you can’t skill them fast enough. So, automation becomes essential: It reduces job complexity and enables people to be trained and cross-trained much faster. So yes, there will be jobs—but we must make people ready for those jobs. You cannot create a sufficiently large talent pool in time through traditional skilling alone. Automation becomes a critical link,” Sawhney added.

The reporter was in Chicago at the invitation of Rockwell Automation.